Customers are at the heart of everything we do at Monzo, so we’re very excited to share some thoughts and insights from the Customer Operations team this week. Hopefully by the end of this week you'll know a little more about the people at the other end of your in-app chat and our vision for the future.
Our very first customer service hire (who now leads the team with responsibility for all onboarding and development), Emma Northcott, introduces Customer Operations Week with an insight into our approach to customer service.
We have world-class people
Often when one thinks of customer support they think of a warehouse sized, outsourced, call centre with headsets and cubicles. At Monzo we do things a bit differently (although we do have headsets - they’re wireless and pretty cool though 😉 ), and this begins with the amazing people on the other end of your in-app help button.
We currently have a team of 37 (and growing!) dedicated customer operations team members, or, as we prefer, “COps”. Our mission is to make sure you receive timely and accurate help, whenever and wherever you need it. We have a rigorous recruitment process - empathy and logical reasoning are prerequisites for great candidates, and this has helped us narrow the thousands of applicants down to the talented people who handle your queries every day.
It’s very important at Monzo that everyone in the company enjoys the privilege of playing “COp” every now and then. Two or three non-COps team members join us for the lunchtime rush every day. This helps us keep the wait times under control and offers them some valuable insights into the user experience and notable ‘pain points’ which compromise the quality of our service. If something is particularly frustrating or inconvenient, either for our users or for the COps team to manage, the issues are often better understood by other teams after dealing with the fallout first hand. In many cases, this gives us the leverage to push for swift action to fix the source of friction!
We care, deeply
One thing we look for in everyone who joins the team at Monzo, regardless of their job title, is empathy. We believe real empathy can’t be taught or enforced. It can be nurtured and encouraged, but it needs to be an inherent aspect of your team culture for the benefits to be felt by colleagues and customers. Whilst it’s important to provide a service which is rapid and accurate, the best reflection of the quality of service we strive for is that every person you speak to is genuinely motivated to find the best outcome for each and every customer. If you’re unhappy, we’re unhappy; if you’re delighted, we’re delighted - and we like being delighted!
We are your voice within Monzo
Just as we are Monzo’s voice to you, we are also your voice to the rest of Monzo. This means that the rest of the company is guided by the COps team because we represent the most important thing: you, our customers.
Whilst we love talking to you, it would be even better if you never even needed to contact us! We have bi-weekly meetings with the external and internal product teams to feedback how we can improve the app and the overall experience for you. We have strong representation in the weekly Executive Committee meeting, with both our Chief Operations Officer and Head of Operations attending. We drive changes on your behalf, as small as changing the copy in a certain section in the app, to completely changing how our onboarding process works.
One of our biggest ongoing challenges is making sure our team members don’t burn out - trying to support the current rate of growth whilst maintaining the same level of due care and consideration with every customer query is a difficult balancing act. We work closely with the internal product team to find ways to ease this load and help us realise our goal of one day supporting 100,000 customers per team member!
We hope you enjoy getting to know us a little better over the next few days! If you have any questions or comments, we would, as always, love to hear them ❤️
Oh, and if this sounds like a team you'd like to join, we're hiring!